Frozen Homemade Ramen

Yesterday, I ate the remaining 1/4 that I froze a week ago. The texture was excellent, identical to the fresh portions. The same problems with inconsistent texture remain, although that is to be expected.

Making Ramen

No, I don't mean of the instant sort, I mean fresh, un-fried ramen noodles. I've always wondered why it was so easy to find economical packs of frozen udon and dry soba, but not ramen. It's always in single serving frozen packs that are uneconomical for everyday use.

Apparently, one of the key ramen mysteries is kansui, a brine water that contains various salts including sodium and potassium carbonate. Kansui somehow causes the gluten in the wheat dough to form longer chains, creating ramen's characteristic chewy texture. However, finding kansui for purchase seems to be non-trivial, particularly here in Ithaca.

After some more searching, I wandered across this thread at egullet.com that discussed the issue. It seems that egg can be substituted for kansui to similar effect with some modification to the recipe. A link to a recipe in Japanese was provided, and google's translator provided an adequate conversion to english. Then, I proceeded to try to make some ramen.

I followed the directions, and everything was pretty straightforward, except for the actual shaping of the noodles. I have only a small cutting board and a dessert wine bottle as dough shaping implements. The dough from the recipe is very tough and elastic. Thus, I had trouble getting the dough to my desired thinness. I eventually switched to stamping the dough (placed in a ziplock bag) with my foot (which is how the recipe recommends kneading the dough) in order to flatten it. Then, dust with flour, fold, and stamp again. (Note: Dust with plenty of flour. If you use too little, you'll stamp the two folded halves back into one.)

And how were the resulting noodles? Pretty good, chewy as they should be with little to no hint of egg when cooked properly. Cooking perfectly was impossible, however, because all the noodles were of uneven thickness. Some were too soft, others tasted too much of salt and egg from being inadequately cooked. Overall though, pretty decent. I divided the dough into 3 parts:

1. 1/4 cut, cooked, and consumed after a 2 hour rest, as per the recipe
2. 1/2 cut, cooked, and consumed after being refrigerated overnight
3. 1/4 cut after being refrigerated overnight and then frozen

I really couldn't tell the difference between the 2 hour rest and overnight rest. I have not yet eaten the frozen noodles, I probably will later this week. Since I've frozen fresh Chinese noodles for months in the past and detected no significant degradation, I don't expect much degradation for these noodles either.

Remaining mysteries:

• Technique to shape thinner and more uniform noodles (kitchen too small to accomodate larger cutting board or pasta maker; also too poor to afford either)
• Find out of dough is easier to stretch when warmer (softer?) or colder (less elastic?) -- maybe it doesn't matter since hand-heat will warm up the relatively small amount of dough I need to work with at a time (becuase of the small working space)
  
• Possibility of adding 25-50 mL of extra water to soften to dough and make it easier to work with. What is the resulting difference in cooked texture? Will I have to make two batches side-by-side to tell?